Mondays: See you this week! jmovie review

I have been watching a lot of time travel shows recently with Tokyo Girl, Summer Time Machine Blues and Toki wo Kakeruna, Koibitotachi so I felt compelled to watch Mondays when anonymous recommended it in the comments section. What compelled me was that Mondays was a time loop movie set in an office.

Wan Marui who was also in Toki wo Kakeruna, Koibitotachi is the main character Yoshikawa who is unaware that she is stuck in a time loop that goes from Monday to Sunday and back again starting with a pigeon crashing into the window of the office. However, two of her colleagues have become aware of the time loop and it takes considerable effort for them to convince Yoshikawa of this.

Mondays has a lot of the tropes of the time loop genre such as learning new skills, continuing to fail until succeeding and generally becoming a better person. The thing is Mondays does everything very well. Once the story starts going, it is very funny watching our main characters try to convince people of the time loop and to ultimately stop it.

Time loop stories are easy to shoot because you mostly only need one major set that you can reuse for the majority of the movie, so you can spend your budget and make it look like a real office. I thought that the office setting was refreshing for a science fiction story though I wish they had the budget to do the dance sequence and the mystery of who or what is responsible for trapping them in the time loop. I thought it was very Japanese-like for the people stuck in the time loop to still feel the need to do the work in case their week did not loop. I guess there is no such thing as calling sick for the week in Japan.

Mondays: See you this week! is a wholesome and feel good time loop movie without any flaws and a lot of heart. It kind of reminds me of Kisaragi, another movie set in one location except without the time travel. The question is do I give it a must watch like Kisaragi? It is certainly the best time travel jmovie I have ever seen and I think that deserves a must watch. I think the director managed to squeeze every drop of blood from the stone for this low budget movie. I am also a sucker because the final part of the movie is about a storytelling medium that I love very much. Flawless, with a lot of heart. My one regret is that I wish I had seen it at JFF 2023. 

On a related note, the Japanese Film Festival Online is going on now until 31 July. Looks like you can watch it from anywhere in the world. Support Japanese movies without paying a cent! I definitely recommend Anime Supremacy if you have not seen it. I need to activate my Netflix soon to watch Godzilla Minus 1 but I just don't have time for Netflix on top of my usual stuff. Thanks to anon for the recommendation!